President shutting out reporters

WASHINGTON -- There is a striking resemblance to covering the White House and nourishing an infant.

You know the kind of activity parents engage in when they feed the baby by pretending the spoon full of apple sauce is a loaded airplane or helicopter and the mouth is a hanger. This is accompanied by aeronautical noises aimed at diverting the kid's attention from the true objective.

This happens in most administrations, but the current one is more adept at it than usual, particularly since the spoon is often empty of any sustenance for a thinning cadre of correspondents hungry for excitement and eager to convince the world and themselves that what they are doing is not only a glamorous journalistic assignment but enormously important.

President Obama and his minions, on the other hand, seem to have decided that long-held traditions of a ubiquitous free press geared to reporting everything big or small in his day is actually a detriment to his goals. He has even on at least one occasion shaken the press pool to its foundation by hustling secretly off without reportorial accompaniment, utterly ignoring the possibility that something might happen to him without the knowledge of his subjects, the American people.

Meanwhile, his seemingly part-time press secretary, raised on the pap of Capitol Hill and completely lacking in enthusiasm not to mention charisma, treats the care and feeding of the press with bored disdain, according to most assessments, preferring apparently to provide the president with his wise assistance in other matters and hoping some day to take over the job of chief political adviser from David Axelrod, who plans to head off before too long to help his messiah win re-election.

Probably the most disillusioning and in some ways embarrassing performance in a nation where a free and open press is a symbol of everything else we stand for came during the recent Nuclear Security Summit attended by the heads of 46 countries. Also on hand was a glorious gathering of the world's press, eager to be in a country where openness and journalistic acceptance are celebrated. Well, at least that's what they thought.

But that was before they were locked out of nearly everything being debated by their own presidents and foreign ministers in the two days of meetings.

According to reports, the "summit" was so tightly managed that reporters were given access that lasted literally less than 60 seconds. Nearly all the agenda of individual meetings carried a "no press" notice. This of course is at the behest of a president who soon will attend the White House Correspondents Association dinner, where there are more Hollywood stars present than working journalists and whose organization has been reduced to listening to Obama filibuster his own press conferences with long answers to planted questions from those picked to be called upon ahead of time.

A wise mentor once said that no one wants to hear reporters whine about how they have been mistreated. On the other hand, it is difficult to take lightly the disregard for the press held by a Chicago organizer who made it all the way to the White House in record time largely from publicity and enormously favorable treatment from the very journalists he now appears to eschew.

There is something much bigger at stake here. If Obama has decided that he now doesn't need anyone looking over his shoulder, it is a sad day for all of us, and that contention needs no further explanation. Those who are satisfied with only what he wants to tell them without question deserve what they get.

So the always overrated job of covering the White House has become even more so. It is about as glamorous as cleaning stalls, with the product of the labor about the same. The president joked recently about the press being angry with him after he sneaked out to go to his daughter's soccer game.

Hmmm .. looks the presstitutes are finally learning the downside of the Deal With The Devil they made for access = CONTROL.

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Is the press finally tiring of Obama?
Wednesday, April 14, 2010

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If Dana Milbank is any example, they’re certainly not particularly happy with the way they were treated at the just ended nuclear summit in DC:

"World leaders arriving in Washington for President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit must have felt for a moment that they had instead been transported to Soviet-era Moscow.

They entered a capital that had become a military encampment, with camo-wearing military police in Humvees and enough Army vehicles to make it look like a May Day parade on New York Avenue, where a bicyclist was killed Monday by a National Guard truck."

*snip*

"The only part of the summit, other than a post-meeting news conference, that was visible to the public was Obama’s eight-minute opening statement, which ended with the words: “I’m going to ask that we take a few moments to allow the press to exit before our first session.”

*snip*

Controlling the press through access and the amount of time they’re given with the subject of their interest is a pretty tried and true way less than free countries give the impression of having a free press when, in fact they don’t. I’m not suggesting that’s the case here – yet – but this bit by Milbank suggests that an opinion of how this administration works with the press is forming and it doesn’t appear favorable.

That said, you also have to remember that the press thinks they should have unlimited access at all times, so there is certainly a natural friction there. But there’s also an expected, or at least a traditional level of access that I’m getting the impression the press is not seeing and are just now beginning to grumble about.

After citing a number of foreign reporter’s comments about their surprise at the press restrictions, Milbank says:

"Reporters, even those on the White House beat for two decades, said these were the most restricted such meetings they had ever seen. They complained to both the administration and White House Correspondents’ Association, which will discuss the matter Thursday with White House press secretary Robert Gibbs."

*snip*

"Over the weekend, Obama broke with years of protocol and slipped off to a soccer game without the “protective” pool that is always in the vicinity of the president in case the unthinkable occurs. Obama joked about it later to Pakistan’s prime minister, saying reporters “were very upset.”

*snip*

Unlike Milbank and the rest of the press, I’m not particularly surprised by this.

It has been fairly obvious that this administration has viewed the press as a tool to be manipulated from the beginning – in fact, it was fairly clear during the campaign.

The vaunted “openness” of the campaign was a device used to paint a picture of a candidate who would conduct his presidency the same way. The reality has been far from the promise.

Now the administration has no need – or it seems, desire – to have that promised openness and now the press, which was complicit in building the myth, is upset.

They don’t seem to have yet picked up on the fact that this administration doesn’t see it’s role as that of governance and service. It’s there to rule. And controlling the message and manipulating the press is how one rules.

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